So it was Super Bowl weekend and while 140 private jets appear to have been tasked with delivering rich people back home after the event I was rushing through Mcdonald’s and was delivered a paper straw to drink with. As you can guess from the title, it got soggy long before I was done with the drink.

Ultimately most of the effort around getting regular people to cut back on their carbon emissions “for the environment” is about making us feel like something is happening. It’s the same tactics that big cigarette used to direct attention away from how bad smoking was. They funded environmental studies to tell us that we should be focusing on the environment, not the health detriments of smoking. They created scientific uncertainty as policy.

A real fix to environmental catastrophe would be outlawing private flights.

A step in the right direction would be focusing on walkable cities, instead of prioritizing moving vehicles.

But that might affect how much businesses could earn, or force rich people to fly with “regular” people that can merely afford first class. Rich people have the money and time to lobby so we get stuck with silly rules about straws while they fly around causing enough environmental impact that my family could use plastic straws many times a day for our entire lives and still not have the same devastating footprint as the private flights leaving one event on one day.

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